Opera is one of the browsers which somehow managed to get closer to the two kings of the browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, attracting more audience every day. However, a growing popularity doesn't necessarily mean that a certain application is 100 percent secure because it has bugs too and they must be fixed quickly enough to avoid all potential exploits.

This is the case of the report you're about to see becauseolder versions of the browser are vulnerable to some highly critical vulnerabilities confirmed by its developers. This is not the first time when Opera is the subject of security notifications but what's important is that the company manages to fix them quite quickly without putting users' information at risk.

Security company Secunia wrote that a potential successful exploitation of the flaws might allow the attackers to execute arbitrary code and get the affected system even more vulnerable. Here's the description of the two vulnerabilities as published by Secunia:

1) An error when prompting the user to add a newsfeed can be exploited to cause an invalid memory access via a specially crafted newsfeed source.2) An error exists in the processing of HTML CANVAS elements. This can be exploited to cause a memory corruption via specially crafted scaled pattern images.

The folks at Opera Software have already confirmed the flaws, which have been rated as moderately severe and highly severe, and released an updated version of the browser in order to correct the vulnerabilities. In case you're currently using Opera Browser and you'd want to patch it (you MUST want to patch it because leaving it vulnerable may threat the security of your computer), you have to download or update the browser to the latest release, namely the 9.27 edition.

Just as usual, you can download the latest version of the browser, as well as many other applications, straight from Softpedia, using this link.